Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In a photograph taken in Ed Clark’s Louisiana studio in 1978, the artist stands with balletic poise in vest and shorts, concentrating on powering paint across a canvas on the floor with a janitor’s broom.He invented the painterly technique he called “the big sweep” in 1956 in Paris, while part of the exodus of creative African Americans — including James Baldwin and Miles Davis — who grasped the freedom and respect they found in postwar France. His choice of paintbrush was later perceived as an ironic swipe at menial labour and discrimination. Yet, propelled by “modern times”, Clark once said, “I just felt I needed that speed.”“Locomotion” (1963), a 12ft-wide canvas whose explosive gestural strokes in flame orange and candyfloss pink are balanced by controlled sweeps of dark green and midnight blue, is among the abstract paintings on show in Ed Clark at Turner Contemporary in Margate, the first institutional exhibition in Europe devoted to his work. Clark, who died in 2019 aged 93, settled in New York in the 1950s. With a career spanning seven decades, he is belatedly being rediscovered as a pioneer among second-generation Abstract Expressionists of the New York school — when Manhattan overtook Paris as the driving force of Modernist innovation.Ten years ago, the artist David Hammons curated Edward Clark: Big Bang at New York’s Tilton Gallery. The Whitney acquired its first painting in 2019 — the year he gained gallery representation by Hauser & Wirth, which published a monograph last year. Clark’s oval canvas “Yenom (#9)” (1970), painted in poured acrylic with a push broom, was at Tate Modern in 2017, in the group show Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. Yet most of these dynamic, high-energy works — a kind of action painting — have never been shown outside the US before.They are not all abstracts. The opening room’s small “Self-Portrait” (1947-49), in layered watercolour on board, captures with meticulous realism a serious young man in a flecked blue jacket, with freckles and a pencil moustache made of vertical dabs. It was painted in his parents’ bathroom “under fluorescent light”, the artist’s daughter, Melanca Clark, tells me, and modelled on Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings. “Everything you want to know about the artist” is in it, his fellow artist and friend Jack Whitten said of its “youthful idealism”, its “truthfulness” and indeed its precocious self-confidence.Born in New Orleans in 1926, Clark had moved north to Chicago, aged seven, during the Depression. His parents were from Louisiana’s Creole community. His father could “pass” as white for work but otherwise declined to do so. From his early drawings in Catholic school, Clark “knew he could be the best and be ignored”, his daughter says. “He learned you can’t rely on the arbiters.”Clark, who served two years in an Air Force labour unit in Guam during the second world war, made that self-portrait during four years’ rigorous academic training at the Art Institute of Chicago, thanks to the GI Bill. In 1952, he used his leftover GI credits for informal workshops at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. In France, it was liberating to be seen simply as an American.A Cubist still-life pencil drawing recalling Cézanne, from a late-1940s sketchbook, illustrates Clark’s telescopic passage through influences at the Louvre. After night school in Chicago, Paris was where he first worked in natural light and discovered colour. He abandoned figuration after chancing upon Nicolas de Staël’s semi-abstract “Les Footballeurs (Parc des Princes)” (1952), realising that the “surface was more interesting than the subject”. He said: “The real truth is in the stroke . . . The paint is the subject. The motions of the strokes give the work life.”Moving to New York in 1956, he pioneered shaped canvases using collage, coating paper with strokes of oil paint that stick out beyond the canvas edge. A prototype from 1956 that created a huge stir, and spawned imitators, is lost. But “Untitled” (1957) has red splatter and bold brushstrokes fanning out beyond the “frame”. Embracing the physicality of painting, Clark made huge, seemingly spontaneous yet carefully composed works with a 4ft push broom. “Maple Red” (1963) incorporates drips, broom hairs and dirt from the studio floor. Mesmerising elliptical canvases in the 1970s, their ovals reflecting the shape of the eye, resemble landscapes or celestial bodies in harmonious colours, with broad sweeps conjuring horizons.The archive documents how Clark co-founded the co-operative Brata Gallery on 10th Street in 1957, after his first solo show in a Paris gallery. A flyer for a joint show, Downtown Uptown (1956), has photographs of 53 diverse artists. “There was no Black-white polarisation among the artists then,” Clark recalled. “We were all struggling.” Willem de Kooning provided a formula for paint — recorded in a note. Donald Judd gave Clark a solo show in his loft in 1971. According to his daughter, Clark made a living selling to “mostly white collectors, then in the 1990s the Black middle class came into its own.” Yet as for institutional recognition, Clark told the writer Quincy Troupe, “it was tough to be taken seriously, or even noticed, if you were an abstract painter who’s Black.” The art establishment “assumed the whole Abstract Expressionist movement . . . was inhabited only by white painters. They thought Black painters should paint their own people.”Melanca Clark, a civil rights lawyer and leader who worked in the Obama administration, says her father had a “keen awareness of the injustice of race”. Yet he resisted pressure to create politically legible art. An exception is “Blacklash” (1964), an angry splatter of black and red, painted in response to the murder of a 15-year-old boy, James Powell, by an off-duty police officer, and the violence meted out to protesters. With a broom, the artist said, “you crush through things.”After his first retrospective, Edward Clark: A Complex Identity, at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1980, he experimented with pushing dry pigment across canvas with a wet broom. Summering in Paris in the 1980s, he painted a standout Paris Series of “tubular” acrylic paintings that are as brightly seductive as they are technically brilliant. “His evolution was fearless,” his daughter says. For Clark, who wanted his art to appeal to “regular folks . . . to servants and intelligentsia both”, restless innovation was “for the sake of the search”.To September 1, turnercontemporary.org
